Wolvesmouth at the Wolvesden is one of Los Angeles’s best kept secret dinners. Though the dinner itself is exceptional, the Wolvesmouth experience is more about the intimate setting than the food. Rather than call for a reservation, the staff selects who comes to dinner by picking 20 lucky guests off a huge waiting list of hopefuls. Once there, these 20 guests are welcomed into a secret location, encouraged to drink and mingle and served a beautifully plated gourmet meal.
When you attend, it’s almost impossible to not see Los Angeles’s secret restaurant, Wolvesmouth, as a social experiment. Here we were dining with 18 other strangers, all different ages, careers, hometowns and neighborhoods, sharing wine, food and conversation as if we’d known each other for years. That’s what Craig Thornton does at Wolvesmouth.
Having worked in other restaurants for year’s prior, Craig became in tune with the things he did and didn’t love about the typical restaurant experience. The first of course, is the closed nature of going out. You rarely if ever talk to other guests and you don’t have the freedom to move around as you’d like. Second is the lesser-known woes of working in the kitchen. In a typical restaurant, turn around is fairly high, as chefs learn all they can from a restaurant and then make their way off to another. At Wolvesmouth, the chefs are in it for the long hall and the majority of the staff has been with the company over 5 years.
I wouldn’t have known we were at the right spot if there weren’t people already waiting outside. They looked as uncertain as we did, anxiously looking at their phones and talking in hushed voices. At exactly 6:45, a man opened the locked fence and beckoned us inside.
The front yard’s homeyness felt strangely out of place – the sort of backyard you’d find in the LA suburbs, not squished between a business and a Philly cheesesteak joint. When the man opened the front door and invited us in, I forgot where we were entirely. A large wooden table set for 20 was positioned at the center of the room directly facing a large open kitchen where 5 chefs were hard at work. It was warm and welcoming inside, but not too hot. Taxidermied wolves, deer and hawks lined the walkway and walls like trophies from a recent hunt. It simultaneously felt old school regal yet chic, and the house smelled amazing.
Once everyone was inside, a man introduced himself as Caleb and told us to make ourselves at home. He encouraged us to make our way around the house and kitchen, to mingle with other guests and help ourselves to wine.
The instructions said BYOB, so I wandered over to the makeshift bar to place my two bottles of wine on the table as a contribution, and others followed. We started opening bottles, making conversation with other guests and tasting the different wines and beers. The initial nervousness was put aside and the ambiance definitely felt more like an intimate dinner party than a group of strangers at a restaurant.
Dinner was 9 courses, and we were encouraged to get up and walk around in between. It definitely helped. Can you imagine eating 9 courses while just sitting for an hour and a half? Your food baby would probably explode out of your gut or something. Being able to mosey around the kitchen, talk to the chefs and hang out at the bar not only gave us time to breathe in between courses, but also kept the energy of the room lively and flowing.
The dinner consisted of 7 savory courses, 2 desserts and 12 bottles of wine, and lasted about an hour and a half. When it was time to go, guests lingered around the table before leaving, taking the time to say their farewells to other groups and thank the chefs and kitchen staff. That stuff just doesn’t happen at normal restaurants, but after experiencing the dinner here, I consider this a shortcoming for the typical dining expeirence. At Wolvemouth, they emphasize the primitive nature of eating a meal with other people and went above and beyond as far as taste, presentation and ambiance.
